I’ve long grown accustomed to the notion that the metric system is easier and more practical than the English system of measurement used here in the US. We do numbers in base 10, so it’s far easier to contemplate meters, centimeters and kilometers than it is to go from feet down to inches and up to miles. In my past life as an engineer, I’ve worked with both systems, separately and as a “mishmash,” i.e. when I worked on rockets, we did the vehicles in pounds, feet and inches, but the orbits in kilometers and kilometers per second. Odd, yes, but it’s easier to do what you’ve grown accustomed to doing.
Some believe that the latter sentiment is what has kept the US from joining the rest of the world in going metric, that it’s just American laziness and a lack of will that keeps us stubbornly clinging to our miles, feet, inches, sixteenths, quarts, pounds (mass or force?), ounces, cups, drams, mils, furlongs, fathoms and other crazy non-decimal fractions and multiples. But, as an aforementioned engineer and home improvement enthusiast, I recognize that there’s a real and substantial cost associated with changing our society over to what we called hard metric in the defense world. Hard metric involves round numbers i.e. a bolt would be 13mm instead of half an inch in diameter. Roughly the same size, but not exactly. Soft metric, a standard that was proposed on a particular job I was on, involved keeping everything the same size but labeling it in metric units. So, that half inch bolt would be 12.7mm in diameter.
Therein lies the issue. The point of going metric is to make things simpler, to reduce the amount of weird math that people have to do. But, if we only go “soft metric,” that defeats the purpose. A standard sheet of plywood is 4 feet by 8 feet (48 inches by 96 inches), exactly. The nation’s homes and other structures are built with these standard sheets of plywood. The metric world measures building materials in millimeters (mm), and that standard sheet is 1219mm x 2438mm. That doesn’t make things much easier, does it? Those millimeter measurements don’t divide easily the way feet or inches do. Of course, the world doesn’t use our standard sheet of plywood. Buy a sheet of plywood in Australia and you’ll get something that’s 1200 by 2400 mm. Those are very easy numbers to manage (having 2, 3 and 5 as factors, you can dice them up in all sorts of ways). The problem is that our nation is built on the presumption that a sheet of plywood is 4 feet by 8 feet, not 3.94 feet by 7.88 feet (or 3 feet 15/16″ x 7 feet 7/8″). A metric conversion would necessitate not just retooling the factories that make sheets of plywood, but require that lumber yards and home improvement centers carry two different sizes of plywood – for new construction and for existing construction. Apply this to everything in our lives, and you see the enormity of the challenge. The process would be chaotic, cost a huge amount of money, dramatically affect productivity, enable all sorts of mistakes and cause widespread confusion.
It can be argued that the cost and difficulty is temporary, that there’ll come a day when we’re all comfortably “metric,” and that we’ll be better off for it. This last point doesn’t go by unchallenged. Apart from the we not referring to any living adult (our brains have wired themselves to understand how long a mile and an inch are), why would we be better off? Yes, it would be nice if the world used a common system of measurement, but the same could be argued about language or on which side of the road cars drive. Why should several generations be put through the difficulty and cost of converting, just to make things a bit simpler for people who are not yet born?
Moreso, who says it’s better? Simpler, yes. But, consider the Celsius scale. My European and Canadian friends have, quite often this cold winter, discussed temperatures in Celsius, where zero degrees is a cold but not uncomfortably cold temp, where 20 degrees is a pleasant late spring day, where 30 degrees is balmy beach weather and where 40 degrees is brutally hot. Sure, from a scientific standpoint it’s convenient to know that water freezes at zero and that it boils at 100, but for how many of us does that convenience warrant a numerical scale that’s so “tight” and that routinely requires negative numbers in northern climes?
The case is made here that Fahrenheit is better than Celsius. In Fahrenheit, 0 to 100 bounds the temperature range that humans normally experience, and when you see a negative number or a triple digit number, you know it’s REALLY cold or REALLY hot. In Celsius, 0 is cold but not terribly so, and 100 is “dead.” In fact, in Celsius, 50 stands a good chance of killing you. For science, it’s a convenient scale, but real scientists use Kelvin anyway. For the rest of us? Celsius isn’t particularly useful.
Jokes about the complicated and antiquated English system of measures that America uses are commonly lobbed at Americans by their European brethren, who think it’s just one example of how stubborn and backward we are. I used to lament that America didn’t change over way back when, before the standardization and increased precision that came with industrialization made it an expensive proposition, but in the end we’re just talking about making some math a little simpler. And, as to that, Americans are already awash in mathematical ignorance (ever watch a young person working a cash register try to make change without using the computer?), so a little more mental exercise isn’t such a bad thing.
Keep your metric system. I’ll stick with my feet and my Fahrenheit.
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